On April 27, 2007, a massive cyberattack was launched against Estonia. Not some of its citizens, companies or institutions. The attack was aimed at the entire country. This event went down in history as the very first instance of state-on-state cyberwarfare: the world’s first true cyber war.
On June 27, 2017, almost all of Ukraine was paralyzed by NotPetya: a piece of malware designed with a single purpose - to destroy everything in its path. To this day, it remains the most devastating cyberattack ever conducted, causing at least $10 billion in damages across the world. However, the NotPetya malware had a secret - a small clue which unravelled a possibility of a deeper purpose.
On November 24, 2014, Sony Pictures was hit by a devastating cyberattack that leaked terabytes of data and shocked the world. Allegedly carried out by North Korea over a movie, a private company became the target of an international act of cyberwar.
The Shadow Brokers leaks are one of the pivotal moments in history: not only did they create a massive wave of cybercrime and caused nothing short of a political scandal, they also gave birth to one of the Internet's most enduring mysteries. Who were the Shadow Brokers? How did they pull off one of the craziest hacks of our time? The answer is somewhere out there - and now we are closer to the truth than ever before.
How do you hack the largest tech corporation in China? Well, if you are the National Security Agency of the United States, you just… send a phishing email. At least that’s how Operation Shotgiant, one of the most ambitious operations of the NSA, happened. In the span of a few years, Huawei was hacked - and possibly, all of its users.
At one point in 2019, somebody managed to hack the entire government of the United States and some of the country’s biggest corporations in one sweeping attack. How did they do that? Well, first they hacked SolarWinds - the company that supplied software to all those institutions and companies. In this installment of NoRollback, we look at how that was done.
Eligible Receiver 97 was a war game in which a team of hackers, the Red team, attacked the defense forces in charge of maintaining critical US infrastructure, the Blue Team. However, there was a problem: The Blue team had no idea they were participating in a game. In this episode of No Rollback, we uncover one of the most secretive operations in US history, an exercise that exposed a whole nation’s vulnerabilities in just four days.
On May 12, 2017, a malware called WannaCry spread uncontrollably through 150 countries, affecting nearly every continent worldwide. To this day, the attack is considered one of the most infectious in history. However, the discovery of a killswitch abruptly halted all its destruction. Why would anybody deliberately include a killswitch? And most importantly, what exactly did this attack uncover?
On March 20, 2013, the city of Seoul went dark. News stations were halted, ATMS stopped working, and several websites were defaced by two mysterious hacktivist groups. The attack unfolded during a tense period between North Korea and South Korea, making the culprit seem obvious…but was it really North Korea? And perhaps most importantly, what was the true purpose of this operation: pure chaos or something more calculated?
On January 12, 2010, Google revealed that it was hacked. In a few days, a multitude of other major companies came forward admitting the same. Eventually, these attacks became known as Operation Aurora: one of the most ambitious hacking campaigns ever conducted. What clues about its origin and purpose can be found by digging deep enough into the code?
On May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline, the largest fuel pipeline operator in the United States, was hit by ransomware. For an entire week, the East Coast was paralyzed: fuel shortages, flights rerouted, and panic buying that echoed the oil crises of the 1970s. But this incident revealed a darker truth: America’s critical infrastructure was vulnerable and unprotected.
Anthropic Claude was used to hack 17 organizations in under a month - by a single person. How does vibe hacking really work? What role does modern AI have in the world of cybersecurity? From the earliest imaginings of how the world of AI hackers could look to an in-depth exploration of an actual cyberattack performed using AI, this video explores how artificial intelligence inserted itself into the world hitherto inhabited solely by weird men who wear black hoodies and don't shower enough.
In July 2016 Su Bin, a Chinese national, was convicted of spying for China. According to the authorities, he transferred mountains of data on various military projects, including the crown jewel of American aircraft engineering: the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet. Su Bin wasn’t alone - he worked with a team of hackers. So, here’s all we know about how the team, led by Su, hacked and stole the most advanced jet at the time - and why their operation was just a small part of the picture.
In the 2020s, Conti took the criminal world by the throat, emerging as one of the most sophisticated ransomware groups and amassing millions of dollars worldwide. That was until, in 2022, a series of leaks shattered their carefully curated reputation and led to their sudden disappearance. However, Conti’s downfall had begun much earlier, when a single incident uncovered their crime machine had a critical flaw.
This is the story of three hackers: Severa, Forb and Killmilk. All three have been at the center of Russia’s cybercriminal underground - and all three have been tied to FSB. So, how does Russia’s main intelligence hire its hackers?
They also can’t harm you because they are just a pranking group. But no longer. The Cult of the Dead Cow went down in history as one of the most influential hacker gangs - but real hacks are just a part of their story. Their prank hacks were even more important, and the most influential one had an impact we can still feel to this day. Hong Kong Blondes operation invented hacktivism, attracted a lot of attention and quite definitely changed the world. But was it a hoax, or was there something real in it?
In 2014, a Ukrainian bank reported a bizarre incident: millions of dollars were disappearing from its accounts. Carbanak, a financial hacking gang, was linked to the case; however, without a clear lead, the investigations went cold. That changed in 2016, when the gang attempted its boldest operation yet, accidentally exposing a three-year-old campaign that had drained the accounts of hundreds of banks across 30 countries. How did Carbanak remain invisible for so long, and more importantly, what exactly led investigators to finally track them down?
In 2025, Bybit, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency firms, made a routine transfer to one of its accounts. Three minutes later, North Korean hackers hijacked the transfer, making 1.5 billion dollars disappear into the abyss. How did this happen, and more importantly, where did the money go?
In 2017 Wikileaks posted one of its best-known exposes: allegedly, the full catalogue of CIA’s hacking tools. The leak was dubbed Vault 7. What was inside it, and how did it all work?
On November 2, 1988, a strange creature paralyzed the internet. Ten percent of all computers connected at the time suddenly stopped working. It was an inexplicable phenomenon, but the truth soon came to light: this was a failed experiment by a university student.